"Is something in it?"
Ji-min, from the stool. Ethan was still crouched with his head under the desk and the smell in his nose, looking at the hole in the wire.
"Not anymore."
Nam-ra came over. She bent and looked, and straightened, and turned to look at the rest of the room in a different way than she had a moment ago — at the floor, the gaps under the benches, the dark line where the cabinets met the wall.
"Door," she said.
—
The door had a lock and the lock had no key. Da-eun found that out by trying it, and then by looking on the desk and in the drawer and on the hook beside the frame where a key would go, and there wasn't one.
"Bench," Nam-ra said. "The end one. It's on wheels."
It was. Ethan got to the near end of it and took the edge in both hands and pulled, and his right hand said something that went up to the elbow, and he let go with it and the bench came round crooked on one arm and jammed.
"Left."
He opened his mouth.
"Left," Nam-ra said again, before he'd got the question out. She'd said it twice, on purpose, without being asked, and she didn't look at him while she did it. Da-eun took the other end. They walked it across the door together, and Nam-ra shot the wheel brakes with her foot, and the door was blocked by a lab bench with a sink in it, which wasn't a wall, but was something.
Ji-min watched from the stool with her foot up. "We're staying, then."
"Ten minutes," Ethan said.
"Ten minutes."
He didn't like how she said it, and didn't have anything to say back.
—
He'd been looking at the papers since they came in. He hadn't touched them; he'd been afraid to disturb the order, because order was the one thing this room had that the rest of the building didn't, and he'd wanted to understand it before he broke it.
Now he picked one up.
Handwriting. Fast, small, slanted, the kind that made even printed Korean look slow to him. Whole lines of it. Then, in the margin, a date — he could read dates — and under the writing a table: columns, numbers, a unit he recognised as grams, another he thought was a temperature. Then more handwriting. Then a small drawing of something with a tail.
He put it down and picked up the next. Same. Different date. Different numbers.
He went through eleven of them like that, reading nothing but the dates, before he stopped and said her name.
"Nam-ra."
She came. He held out the page.
"What does this say. The top."
She took it and read. Not aloud yet — her eyes went down it and stopped and went on and stopped. Then: "Subject four. Day nine." A pause. "Food refused. Response to — " she frowned — "I don't know the word. Light, maybe. Response to light, increased. Bit the glove."
"Bit the glove."
"That's what it says."
He held out the next one.
"Subject four. Day eleven. Response to — the same word. Increased. Bit through the glove."
"And this?"
"Subject two. Day three." She read further and her mouth moved slightly, working at something. "Slow. Normal. Ate." She looked up. "Ethan, these are — "
"Wait. This one."
"Subject four. Day fourteen." She stopped. She read the next line twice. "Attacked subject three through the bars."
Neither of them said anything. Ji-min, on the stool, had gone still.
"Keep going," Ethan said.
—
He didn't need the words. He worked that out about six pages in.
She read him the top lines — subject, day — and he put them down in front of him on the bench in the order they belonged, and after a while she stopped reading the rest of each page because he'd stopped asking. The rest of each page was the part he couldn't use. The top line was a date and a number, and the table under it was numbers, and he could read those as fast as she could read anything.
Subject one, days one to six. Subject two, days one to nine. Subject three, days one to twelve. Subject four, days one to nineteen.
Then the numbers went up.
He laid them out. She saw what he was doing and started handing him pages before he reached for them, top line first, five, day two, five, day three, and he set them down, and neither of them said anything about it.
Grams went down, in every one. Every subject, the same shape: a steady number, and then it fell off a cliff, and then it stopped being recorded at all, and the last few pages for each were handwriting with no table under it. Temperature went up a fraction and stayed. And there was a third column he couldn't name, a single-digit number, that started at zero and climbed, one, two, two, three, four, four, five, until it stopped.
"What's this one," he said. The column.
She looked. "Aggression." She looked at the page and then at the next one. "It's a scale. He's — it's a score. Out of five."
"They all end at five."
"Yes."
"And they all — " He put his finger on the grams. "They all stop eating. Then they get to five. Then he stops writing the table."
"Yes."
"Because there's nothing left to weigh."
She didn't answer that. She didn't have to.
He looked at the pages laid out across the bench, twenty-odd of them in four rows, and the shape was the same in every row, and it was one shape. He'd been thinking of them as separate — subject one, subject two — because that was what the labels said. They weren't separate.
"It's the same experiment," he said. "Over and over. He's doing the same thing to each one and writing down how long it takes."
Nam-ra looked at the rows. Then at him.
"Yes," she said, and there was something different in it from the other times she'd said it.
—
"Ethan."
Da-eun. She was at the far wall, where a steel rack stood empty with its shelves labelled, and she'd been there for a while — he'd registered her moving around the edges of the room, arms crossed, looking, as she had at the window — and now she said his name and nothing else, and when he looked up she said, "Here."
He went.
The rack had six shelves and each shelf had a strip of tape on its front edge with a number written on it in marker. One to six. Four of the shelves were scored at the back — long scratches in the steel, bright, in a pattern that was either random or wasn't — and the fifth had a dark stain along the front lip that had run down the upright and dried.
"Five," Da-eun said. She pointed at the stain. Then at the rack, at the numbers, at the bench where he'd laid out the pages in their rows. "You've got five?"
He had. Five was the longest row. Five was the one that had gone on for twenty-three days before the table stopped.
He looked at the rack, then at his rows, then back. The papers were a list of things that had been on those shelves.
"Thank you," he said, and Da-eun nodded and went back to the window.
—
"How long?"
Ji-min had got up. She was standing on one foot with a hand on the stool.
"How long are we — you said ten minutes."
"I know."
"You said ten minutes, ten minutes ago." Her voice wasn't loud. "I have a brother upstairs. He's fourteen. You're reading a — " she looked at the bench, the rows, the dates — "you're reading a science project, and he's — "
"If he knew," Ethan said. He stood up, because sitting felt wrong for it. "If he knew this was happening. Before today. Then he might have — there might be something in here about what stops them. What they don't — " He didn't have the word. "Weaknesses."
"Or there isn't. And we've spent twenty minutes reading about mice."
He didn't have anything for that. She was right, or might be, and he couldn't tell her she wasn't.
"My brother doesn't have twenty minutes," Ji-min said.
Nam-ra had been standing at the bench looking at the rows. She didn't look at either of them.
"The stack on the desk," she said. "Under the monitor. We finish that. Then we go."
Ji-min looked at her. Then sat back down.
Ethan looked at her too, because she hadn't taken his side. She'd taken the side of the deadline, which wasn't the same thing, and she'd never once taken his side, and that was one of the reasons he'd crossed the room to her in 2-5.
—
The stack under the monitor was thinner and the handwriting was worse.
She read the top line of the first one and stopped.
"What?"
"Subject zero."
"Zero?"
"That's what it says." She turned the page toward him and pointed, and he looked, and it was a circle, or the character for zero; he couldn't have told them apart in this hand, but she could. "Subject zero. Day one."
"There's no zero on the shelves."
"No."
"There's no zero in the — " He gestured at his rows. One to five. Six with an empty shelf. "So where — "
"I don't know."
He read the date. He could read dates. He read it twice.
Before the cafeteria. Before this morning. Before he'd ever walked through the gate of Hyosan High. He'd still been in California on that date. He'd been packing.
Whatever subject zero was, it had been in this room, or somewhere, being written about, before he'd ever set foot in the building. The outbreak hadn't started at lunch. It had started before he got here, and he'd walked into the middle of it and sat down at a desk nobody wanted.
He looked at the cage under the desk. The bent wire. The hole.
He didn't say it. Nam-ra was looking at the cage too, and she didn't say it either, and that was as close as they'd come all day to agreeing out loud.
—
Something scratched.
Once. Somewhere. Inside the wall, or under the floor, or in the ceiling tiles above the fume cupboard — one dry scrape, like a fingernail on a box, and then nothing.
Nobody moved. Nam-ra had the extinguisher up before the sound finished. Da-eun was flat against the window with her eyes on the ceiling. Ji-min had her hand over her mouth again.
Ten seconds. Twenty.
Nothing.
"We're leaving," Ji-min said, through her hand.
"Yes," Nam-ra said.
—
They were leaving. Da-eun had the wheel brakes off the bench. Ethan was gathering the pages — he didn't know why; he had nowhere to put them — and he knocked the mouse with his elbow doing it, and the screensaver went away.
A desktop. Folders. A window already open, full of files.
He looked because it was in front of him. He couldn't read the folder names. He could read the files, though, or the parts of them that mattered — each one had a small grey icon that meant video, and beside each one a date, and the dates went down the list in order, most recent at the top.
He scrolled. He used his left hand to do it. The list kept going.
"Nam-ra."
She came. She looked at the screen, and she didn't say anything, and he waited, and she kept not saying anything.
"What?"
She reached past him and moved the cursor to the bottom of the list, where the oldest file was, and let it sit there on the date.
He could read the date. It was the same as the one on the page. Before Hyosan.
"They're recordings," she said.
Ji-min, from the stool: "Of what?"
Nam-ra didn't take her eyes off the screen.
"Him."